It really is unfair to brand conservatives as dumb. Look at how smart they have been on matters of national security and economics. Where would we be if we had not listened to the GOP when they called for de-regulation of the financial sector.

Each participant was wired to an electroencephalograph that recorded activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that detects conflicts between a habitual tendency (pressing a key) and a more appropriate response (not pressing the key). Liberals had more brain activity and made fewer mistakes than conservatives when they saw a W, researchers said. Liberals and conservatives were equally accurate in recognizing M.Link

Study from 2007. The Fark thread from this study was epic, with Fark Cons thinking it meant they were smarter.

NateGrey:Each participant was wired to an electroencephalograph that recorded activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that detects conflicts between a habitual tendency (pressing a key) and a more appropriate response (not pressing the key). Liberals had more brain activity and made fewer mistakes than conservatives when they saw a W, researchers said. Liberals and conservatives were equally accurate in recognizing M. Link

Study from 2007. The Fark thread from this study was epic, with Fark Cons thinking it meant they were smarter.

But reality has a liberal bias.

/Conservatives are morons.

so what you're saying is that your liberalness is an act and you're actually Genghis Khan, Hitler and Franco's 3 way homosex lovechild?

Decillion:... My parents had the same birthday. I thought everyone's parents had the same birthday. It never even occurred to me that this was not the case until I was 7 or 8. It was an instant shock to learn the truth. I'll never forget it. Figuring out Santa for yourself gradually is one thing but having a truth told to you is something else. My first reaction was predictable. Denial.

That's a good ^h^h^h^h cool story. No matter how our beliefs are generated, we humans do what we can to hear things to support them and getting over that is damn near impossible.

/Never thought all dads were born on Halloween. Mine was just special that way!

SomeoneDumb: Decillion: ... My parents had the same birthday. I thought everyone's parents had the same birthday. It never even occurred to me that this was not the case until I was 7 or 8. It was an instant shock to learn the truth. I'll never forget it. Figuring out Santa for yourself gradually is one thing but having a truth told to you is something else. My first reaction was predictable. Denial.

That's a good ^h^h^h^h cool story. No matter how our beliefs are generated, we humans do what we can to hear things to support them and getting over that is damn near impossible.

/Never thought all dads were born on Halloween. Mine was just special that way!

-----------------

I was terrified that gorillas would kill me when I was a kid. I watched a lot of Planet of the Apes and saw a news report about guerrillas attacking a school in Rhodesia, complete with a shot of the bloody interior of the school. I just assumed my parents were aware of the gorilla threat and it was quite some time before they realized this was what I actually believed and that I was living in terror over a TV show.

error 303:Given that IQ is generally defined to have a standard deviation of 15, and Fox News has millions of veiwers, the odds that the average IQ of Fox News watchers is 1.3 standard deviations below the average IQ of the US population are 0.00%.

It's almost a meta analysis. The "study" says that Fox News veiwers are idiots, but in turn, any one who believes the results of the study actually demonstrates a lack of intelligence.

You're right about it being incredibly unlikely that a difference this size would occur in this case, but I'm going to pedantically correct something you said anyways.

The odds that you'd see a 1.3 SD difference between two populations with millions of people are very, very unlikely to happen *by chance*. For example, the difference in average height between males and females may (I don't know the SD offhand) exceed 1.3 SD; that doesn't mean it's questionable. It just means it didn't happen by chance.

Rich Cream:make me some tea: Cewley: may be made up, but totally believable.

Not really. I know plenty of very bright people who watch FoxNews religiously. That mindset has nothing to do with intelligence, and everything to do with brainwashing.

Not so much brainwashing as it is birds of a feather flocking together.

/look at you, then look at Fark, then look at you, diamonds

Well, I certainly the basis of it is a "birds of a feather", but they've taken it far, far further beyond simply attracting those who might agree. The perpetuate an alternate reality, disconnected from facts and everyone else. Perpetuating an alternate reality is the definition of brainwashing. Religious cults do it (examples: Jonestown, Warren Jeffs and FLDS). Dictators do it (examples: Nazi Germany, North Korea). I believe this may be the first example of a faction of mainstream media managing it in a western democracy, however.

draypresct:error 303: Given that IQ is generally defined to have a standard deviation of 15, and Fox News has millions of veiwers, the odds that the average IQ of Fox News watchers is 1.3 standard deviations below the average IQ of the US population are 0.00%.

It's almost a meta analysis. The "study" says that Fox News veiwers are idiots, but in turn, any one who believes the results of the study actually demonstrates a lack of intelligence.

You're right about it being incredibly unlikely that a difference this size would occur in this case, but I'm going to pedantically correct something you said anyways.

The odds that you'd see a 1.3 SD difference between two populations with millions of people are very, very unlikely to happen *by chance*. For example, the difference in average height between males and females may (I don't know the SD offhand) exceed 1.3 SD; that doesn't mean it's questionable. It just means it didn't happen by chance.

/Statistician . . . can't help being pedantic on things like this.

No, you're right, and I sort of thought about that when I hit post. I should really brain gooder more posting when critical of others brain goodness.

The old 'lol republicans are so dumb' vs. 'lol libruls be so dumb' meme is annoying though, and contributes to the hyper-partisanship of today's political climate, which I don't think is a good thing. I'd believe that Fox News veiwers are more uniformed than, say, people who listen to NPR, but just pointing at roughly 40% of our population and claiming they're all mouth breathing idiots isn't helping further anything.

Cythraul:It's now how big your intelligence is, it's how you use it. And in the case of Fox News watchers, it doesn't look like they're using it at all.

This.

It wasn't IQ, it was how informed you were. I'm fairly certain my SO's grandparents are brilliant - his grandfather is an amazing musician, and his grandmother is just brilliant at social interactions - which doesn't sound impressive until you realize you're nodding your head and you just agreed to buy $50 of tickets for the church raffle. She led the country in sales for a very well known company while she was working, and a good % of those were straight up cold calls. I don't have either of those skills, not by a long shot, and both require more perception and intelligence than rote book learning.

But all either of them can do when it comes to domestic or foreign issues is parrot Fox. Doesn't matter if it's true or not. Really kinda sad.

I was terrified that gorillas would kill me when I was a kid. I watched a lot of Planet of the Apes and saw a news report about guerrillas attacking a school in Rhodesia, complete with a shot of the bloody interior of the school. I just assumed my parents were aware of the gorilla threat and it was quite some time before they realized this was what I actually believed and that I was living in terror over a TV show.

I was also terrified of gorillas. Gorilla warfare in Laos and Cambodia being what it was. You can imagine how much the flying monkeys in the yearly showing of The Wizard of Oz scared me.

Objectesticle:Believing in stupid things is not an indicator of intelligence - this guy believed in God and was very smart

[media.npr.org image 850x954]

its true but im totally flaming

"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."

Five points might be a little credible; maybe even 10, if you're talking about heavy FoxNews watchers and factor in the correlation of watching more of any TV to lower intelligence. (Really. TVHOURS versus WORDSUM.) But 20 points just didn't add up.

...as he conveniently overlooks how this PR stunt rapidly got fact checked, even on the couple liberal outposts which fell for it. You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but it seems more and more people are getting harder to fool for much time at all.

The Larch:HairBolus: lets see. About 1/9 of all people have an IQ of 80 or below. Crudely a population with an average IQ of 80 would be 1/9 + 1/9 = 22%.

I thought that Fox was watched by 27% of news viewers.

Fox News is watched by about three million people a day. In other words, less than 1% of people in the United States watch Fox News on any given day.

Note I said 27% of news viewers not 27% of the population.

And BTW did you hear the whoosh of something going over your head?

This is where I got the 27% figure. It seems to be a magic number for residual crazyess - a meme going back to 2005.

Obama vs. Alan Keyes. Keyes was from out of state, so you can eliminate any established political base; both candidates were black, so you can factor out racism; and Keyes was plainly, obviously, completely crazy. Batshiat crazy. Head-trauma crazy. But 27% of the population of Illinois voted for him. They put party identification, personal prejudice, whatever ahead of rational judgement. Hell, even like 5% of Democrats voted for him. That's crazy behaviour. I think you have to assume a 27% Crazification Factor in any population.

Typically, this was reduced online to the idea that people who watch FOX News are dumb, dumber than the national average or that watching FOX News makes you dumber.

We didn't need a fake study to know this.It's like knowing that water is wet, or that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Fox News viewers have repeatedly strengthened this stereotype with no real help from outside.

DeaH:But the interesting part is why they made it up. This was done by people on the right...

Of _course_ it was! The bullshiat artist who created the lie in the first place said so! He's totally trustworthy. Pay no attention to the fact that he won't identify either himself or his supposed client.

You may have heard about the study claiming that FoxNews viewers were on average 20 points lower in IQ than the rest of us. Yeah, they made that up

No, I hadn't heard of that, but not being a Fox News viewer I'm smart enough to recognize right off the bat that a claim like that is pretty fishy, even if someone forwarded it to me from the internets.

jjorsett:As usual, the Republican IQ deniers are out in force in this thread.

Deniers.

Wait.... do you mean people who deny that republicans have any IQ or people who are republicans and deny that there is such a thing as IQ? Because either one would work pretty well...

I think the "one in four people are completely batshiat insane" meme goes back a lot farther than 2005 (although this is the first time I've seen 27%)

And I think that more than 4% of the population watches some type of news on a given day (which is what your math implies). Fox News may get the lions share of cable news viewers, but I suspect it's dwarfed by the "regular" over-the-air news programs.

StreetlightInTheGhetto:Cythraul: It's now how big your intelligence is, it's how you use it. And in the case of Fox News watchers, it doesn't look like they're using it at all.

This.

It wasn't IQ, it was how informed you were. I'm fairly certain my SO's grandparents are brilliant - his grandfather is an amazing musician, and his grandmother is just brilliant at social interactions - which doesn't sound impressive until you realize you're nodding your head and you just agreed to buy $50 of tickets for the church raffle. She led the country in sales for a very well known company while she was working, and a good % of those were straight up cold calls. I don't have either of those skills, not by a long shot, and both require more perception and intelligence than rote book learning.

But all either of them can do when it comes to domestic or foreign issues is parrot Fox. Doesn't matter if it's true or not. Really kinda sad.

And yet whenever you get a little niggling that perhaps these awesomely talented and successful people, who have been on the planet more than twice as long as you have, that have lived through events you have only read about, might know a little better than you, you think . . . Nah, fark that, Fox News sucks.